It’s been a long road for Clemson football wide receiver Adam Randall to get back to the best that he can be.
Now a junior, the wideout saw an injury in his freshman season sideline him for the bulk of the season, including the spring, as a true freshman. A season ago, Randall didn’t “start out well”, which lost him confidence at the beginning of the season.
With some help from players and coaches, the Myrtle Beach native hopes to be an X-factor for Clemson’s Week 1 game against No. 1 Georgia.
“I’m just looking to play confident and be confident in the system,” he said on Wednesday. “Last year, I really didn’t start out well, so I just want to start fast and continue it throughout the season.”
The loss of confidence came from the injury in the spring, which saw Randall miss the new-look Garrett Riley offense, which caused him to struggle early on. In his sophomore season, Randall caught 22 balls for 250 yards, hoping to build off of that with a confident junior year.
“Having a new offense come in, I didn’t have the spring, unfortunately, and I had to learn the new offense live during fall camp. It just kind of jumbled my mind up a little bit, but once I got it down, I felt like I was able to take off.”
Riley, wide receivers coach Tyler Grisham and the room are looking to “play fast” on Saturday, which Randall elaborates on the style of this type of offense.
“Playing fast is just having the confidence and the mindset that you’re going to go out there and you know what to do and just execute whatever they throw at you,” he said.
However, there was a surprising figure that played a role in helping out the Clemson offense according to Randall: offensive line coach Matt Luke. With stints at Georgia and Ole Miss, the wideout says that the experience that Luke has is helping with how the offense should run, based on other successful offenses that he has seen.
“I think Coach Luke has also prepared for us, as an offense, [in] just being confident in knowing whatever they throw at us, we are able to handle it,” Randall said. “He knows what a good offensive line and a good offense need to look like within practice, so I think that he’s been really helping us out through camp and through the spring just to instill that confidence and he’s also been pushing us to our max every single day.”
Adam Randell
The wide receiver room is one of the younger rooms on the team, with the junior being one of the oldest players in the group. Because of that, Randall has taken strides as a leader to teach the underclassmen the Clemson way.
“I’ve been in their shoes at some point in time not long ago,” Randall said, “so I just want to be an example for those guys in the room and the offensive side of the ball.”
An example of him displaying leadership has been buying “WRU” t-shirts for the whole wide receiver room, trying to instill confidence in the group to bring back the heralded trademark.
“It was something that I was looking forward to when I got here, and it kind of got discontinued when I got here,” Randall detailed. “I just kind of wanted to bring that back and instill that because I can really see as one of the top wide receiver units in the country if we go out there and play like we are supposed to play. I just wanted the guys to know and feel that this is still the place of Clemson that produces highly talented wide receivers, and that’s what we are going to show this year.”
The Tigers are focused on Saturday, where they will hope to shock the world and upset the top team in the country, Georgia. Randall outlines the game plan for how the wide receivers can be successful in not just Week 1, but every week.”
“The main focus of the wide receiver room going into the season has just been [to] play fast and confident and make plays, make plays when they come to us,” Randall said. “We have the ability within the room, we just need to be on the same page with the quarterbacks [and] be on the same page as everyone else so that we can go out there and make plays and be confident. Once the plays start going in, they are just going to start rolling downhill.”
Randall and the receivers will be in action on Saturday at noon when Clemson will kick off its 2024 season against the Bulldogs.
